When comparing Jenkins vs AWS CodeBuild, the Slant community recommends Jenkins for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted continuous integration services?”Jenkins is ranked 12th while AWS CodeBuild is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Jenkins is:

Jenkins is a free and open source continuous integration tool, while its source code is hosted on [GitHub](https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/).

Pros

Pro

Free and open source

Jenkins is a free and open source continuous integration tool, while its source code is hosted on GitHub.

Pro

Safe to store key environment variables

Self-hosting provides a safe location to store key environment variables since it is the user who is in charge of the server and environment where Jenkins is hosted.

Pro

Highly customizable

Even though Jenkins is pretty functional and useful out of the box, there's a large plugin ecosystem from which the user can choose plugins to integrate into their Jenkins build. This is needed for when the user wants to extend any of the tool's features.

Pro

A lot of resources and tutorials available

Jenkins has been in development since 2004 and is one of the most popular tools of its kind. This means that its technology is very mature and there is a lot of documentation and resources available for it.

Pro

Multiple version control systems supported

Supports the most popular version control systems out of the box: SVN, Mercurial, and Git.

Pro

Stable release line for users who want less changes

This is called the Jenkins Long-Term Support (LTS) version and helps to provide the most stable and assuring version of the Jenkins CI possible. Every 3 months, a version (which has been deemed the most reliable by the community) is chosen. After this, its branched, well-tested features are added (if they are missing), it is tested with the new features, bug fixes are then carried out if necessary, and from there it is released as the official Jenkins LTS version.

Pro

User can source control their chain of automation

Starting with Jenkins 2.0, the pipeline capability, which has been available as a plugin before this version, has been built into Jenkins itself. This allows developers to describe their chain of automation in text form, which can be version controlled and put alongside the source tree.

Pro

Scalable

The distributed builds in Jenkins work effectively, thanks to the Master and Slave capabilities.

Pro

Quantity of available Plugins

For most operations we need not reinvent the wheel, there are plugins already existing.

Pro

Cross-platform build support

Being a Java application it can be installed under any OS: Windows, Linux, and macOS. On the other hand, JNLP slaves also enriches the cross-platform build support for its agents.

Pro

Easy to get up and running

A Jenkins install is very simple and the user can have the service up and running within minutes. To install Jenkins, the command java -jar jenkins.war is all that is needed - nothing more.

Pro

Supports most of the technological stacks for free by specific plugins

Pro

Great community

Jenkins has a large and helpful community, which welcomes new users and provides a great number of tutorials.Project Website, including links to Blog , Wiki, Docs. Community groups via Jenkins Users ML group.

Pro

Self hosted

You stay in full control of your source code, build environment and deployment. No third party gets access to your source code or knows exactly how to build your software.

Pro

Awards and recognition

Including InfoWorld Bossie Award (Best of Open Source Software Award) in 2011, and Received Geek Choice Award in 2014.

Pro

Availability

Had minimal to no issues with the service being available. Also, being an AWS service, it has regional endpoint across various AWS regions.

Pro

Amazon VPC integration

CodeBuild can access resources within a VPC from it's build containers. Useful for customers who have resources in an Amazon VPC, like RDS instance, ElastiCache, GitHub Enterprise source repo, artifact repo, etc.

Pro

On-demand CI. Zero queueing

Users get 20 or so concurrent builds per AWS account ID. Build start up within seconds with no queueing.

Pro

Compliance

CodeBuild is compliant for PCI, ISO, SOC, and HIPAA workloads.

Pro

Windows support

Support for .NET builds using windowsservercore Docker containers. Preconfigured image have .NET Core and several other runtimes like Java, Node, Ruby. Supports custom images for proprietary tooling like full Visual Studio build targets.

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Cons

Con

High overhead

Unlike some of the simple and hosted alternatives, users need to host and setup Jenkins by themselves. This results in both a high initial setup time, as well as time sunk into maintenance over a project's duration.

Con

Poor quality plug-ins that are difficult to combine

There have been several complaints by users regarding the quality of the plug-ins found in Jenkins' official plugin repo. A lot of plugins found in the default plugin directory are no longer actively maintained and as a result, they may be incompatible with later versions of Jenkins or other plugins.

Con

Unstable and lack of plugin integration QA process

Jenkins without plugins is almost useless. All plugins are treated equal and published almost right away.Because there is no process for testing Jenkins' integration, the overall Jenkins experience is not that great. Furthermore, Jenkins' core and plugins are released on a regular basis, all requiring instant restarts, meaning that updates appear more than once a day!

Con

No iOS support

Limited to Linux and Windows builds.

Con

No support for GitLab and Bitbucket server

Off the popular git based source control management system, Bitbucket server and GitLab cloud/on-prem is missing. Generic git support is also not available.

Con

No support for Docker layer caching

Customer managed images may be slower for a cold startup than CodeBuild managed ones.

Con

No unlimited free builds for Open source repo

CodeBuild gives 100 free mins every month, but no unlimited free builds for Open source repository like Travis CI for example.

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